


i don't want to be in your quadrants, i just want to play with your hair

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Alternia-Focused, Alternian Empire, Ancestor-Era (Homestuck), Ancestors (Homestuck), Canon Related, Comfort Sex, Duty, Established Relationship, Hemospectrum, M/M, Melancholy, Puns & Word Play, Subjuggulators, enemies in arms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:47:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24568726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: Sometimes an old enemy is just about the same thing as an old friend.
Relationships: Darkleer/Orphaner Dualscar
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: Ancestor Exchange 2020





	i don't want to be in your quadrants, i just want to play with your hair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [biifurcatedCoder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biifurcatedCoder/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy these two old warhorses sharing a quiet moment.

"Aye, and away t' hell with you, you _fuckin'_ mishatch!" The doors of the throne-room housing the most mirthfoal Grand Highblood swing open to reveal Her Imperious Condescension's Imperial Orphaner, seething with anger as he strides out from the cardiopusher of the Cult of the Messiahs. The edges of his cape flare and flutter around him like the tail of a disgruntled meowbeast, showing his anger as much as the grimace on his face. A mocking hollow laughter follows behind him, before being cut off by the doors closing solidly on his heels. It seems that the meeting did _not_ go well. Then again, you are hard put to remember a time when any meeting the two of them have ever had that has went well. Some trolls are simply doomed to clash, no mareter what else happens.

You clear your throat slightly, and offer him a handkerchief. As he scowls, the scars on his face ripple into new and terrible folds before he wipes the Faygo off his face. The white scrap of cloth comes away brown, and sticky. A baptismal that you have often suffered yourself. Clowns have simple pleasures in life, and they tend to repeat them. Unlike you, hoofever, the Orphaner can leave this place behind him. At least for a time, until the pressures of Empire and Admiralty call him back to again try and negotiate with the chaos of the Cult.

"Rock and Rye?" you inquire, as he gives you the now sodden cloth back, and you hesitate a moment before tucking it back away into an inside pocket. Well, you needed to have this uniform cleaned anyway. A little Faygo was something that the laundrenderers were more than well acquainted with - and the demands of the prodigious sweat that you produce will ye or neigh ye. Removing any stain or residue from one Faygo-tainted scrap's smearings would be well within their capabilities. 

"How the fuck would I know? Do I look like I give a shit what they call their sugary filth," he grunts, and runs his fingers through his hair, preening it back into place between his horns. Gold glitters from his fingers, a brazen declaration of wealth but the heavy rings serve two purposes. To make him look like a court effete, while also providing a weapon of self defence that no one would think to take away from him, believing it to be only courtly affectation. But his rings are hard and square, with no inconvenient stones to get caught on struck flesh, and they cover him to the knuckle like a prize fighter's glove. "I need something t'take the taste from me mouth."

"If you would be so kind as to come with me then, Lord Orphaner..."

He throws his head again like a restless stallion, all restless eye and a glimpse of gritted fangs before scoffing again audibly. The rage on him is visible to a glance, and you bow slightly to give him the respect he's due, eyes down to avoid giving him offence or a reason to hold onto his rage. You are well practised in the ways of those above you, of how to placate and soothe. Without another word, he shoves his hands down behind his back to clasp them moodily, and you lead him off into the corridors of the chorthedral. The place is, of horse, riddled with clowns but no one pays the two of you more than a second glance. The blueblood, obviously leading an unwelcome and unwanted visitor to the front door, or perhoofs to somewhere else entirely. The idea that it could be on anything besides the whims of His Mirthfoalness would be unthinkable. 

Which is why you can do as much as you can.

"Your reputation precedes you, I see," he murmurs, before you push open the door to your own private quarters. There's been no clowns for quite a few corridors now, since you moved into the lowblood, servile areas of the cult complex. And any who see you here with your visitor, will not say a word. It's not their business, and keeping silent means they should _probably_ escape punishment. If they speak up at all, to the wrong superior, they are sure to receive it. It's a question of statistics, of calculating outcomes. A lesson learned early, with trolls. It does not, you will admit, make things easy at times. When you're trying to find out _exactly_ how something went wrong, and no thought of penance in your thinkpan. Only solutions. You are a secretive and terrified race, at the base of the hierarchical pyramid, and you know things have been designed that way. It's on purpose. "Mm? Oh yes, thank you, Horuss..."

You take his cape, letting him shrug it off into your waiting hands. From the luxuriant length of his purple cape to his battered breastplate, undoing the latches and letting him shrug it off with the smell of spilled sugar and old sweat, hanging it on one of your own armour racks. Much more comfortable now, he sprawls on a seatblock beside your nutritional platform, while you take off the topmost layer of your own armour, unzipping the plate-jacket and hanging it besides his lightning-bolt marked shell. As you go to your reserves of recreational liquids (no Faygo to be seen, of horse - it's as much not to your taste as it is to that of your absent master), you heard the quiet scratch and catch of a sparkbox, and the resulting satisfied inhale.

The pungent scent of his smokestick catches your nose and you make a disapproving noise, to his rattling chuckle. All click and warble like any seadweller, but lower than the snotty-nosed courtiers who usually attempt to get your goat. He's older than they are, and deeper chested. It gives him a lower resonance, something that tickles your ancestral hackles with the knowledge that you're sharing space with a predator. You ignore that wary prickle on the back of your neck; you have good practice at such things. If you couldn't ignore it, you would neighver get a single thing done.

"Those are not good for you, they'll take you to your death, you know," you say in rephoof, and he just smirks at you, lazing in the embrace of your seatingblock like he has a right. A right to what? To anything. There's something about the Orphaner Dualscar that is larger than life, bigger than your comfortable rooms. Something of the boundlessness of the sea. You...enjoy it, even though you shouldn't. 

"A lusus will see for me, long before these weak buggers have any chance of making a claim on this set of bones and you know that full well, Executioner." He exhales, the gills in his neck flared as he breathes out smoke through them and his mouth. You place a cool glass of poured beer in front of him and one in front of yourself, as you take up the other seat. One languid hand still holding the rough cylinder of his smokestick, the other picks up his glass. You pick up your own, and the two of you reach across the table to clink them together, a chime of roughfound fellowship that you don't quite know how you reached through the sweeps you've known each other. It had just...happened. "And what about you, eh? That clown gets worse by the night."

You are both very lonely. For different reasons. You suppose that's enough of a reason for anything.

"He is...capricious," you say cautiously, because you can't bring your shields down enough to speak too badly of your superior, even to him. To one of the few who understand how difficolt it is to work with the clowns. You are so very, very tired. These are brief moments of peace, in the entirety of your life that is usually spent with you leaning into the harness of your responsibilities and moving on. Pulling the weight of the cult behind you, and making it go down the channels that Imperial might decrees. It is not as though the subjuggulators care much for the decrees that come from the sea. But they can not afford to flout the Empress _too_ much. You help them tow the line. You don't have a choice to do otherwise.

"Cagey bugger, y'are. Never say a damn thing that you mean, and don't I know it." He swallows from his glass as he spills ash over your nutritionalblock platform instead of the discardcatcher you'd set out for him specifically, and you just shake your head a little before taking a sip from your own glass, letting the insult to your belongings go for the moment. It's always the same, and you don't expect anything different; and yet you still put down the discardcatcher like he is going to use it instead of ash all over your kitchen table.

The talk between the two of you becomes less weighted, leaning more towards smaller things rather than imperial politics and the malicious movements of clowns or sea. He talks about nights and days on the waves, of his ship, his crew. Fondly, and at length. You have no real news to share of your own self and doings, just small tales of executions and death, of clownish mishaps. Just here and there, a few things that have stood out from your nights of relentless work on behalf of the Empire. He laughs outright at one of your anecdotes, and leans across the table. Thin-lipped mouth quirked into a smile, the violet in his eyes gleaming like flowers after rain. The glasses between you have been filled more than once by this time, and it's easy to let him kiss you.

It's easy to let him take you to the usually neglected platform in your respiteblock.

It's easy for both of you to shed your clothes.

It's easy. It's so easy.

His claws fasten in your shoulder, his fangs in your neck. A body just as battle-scarred as your own, but you remind yourself to mind your strength when you grip at his shoulders, his hip as you come together. Just a little. Not as much as you normally would have to. He smells like salt and smoke, mostly covering the scent of the Faygo that had splashed into his hair and down his neck from the contemptuous insult offered to him by the Grand Highblood, but you can ignore that. Easily. 

It isn't pity, it isn't even hate. It's a matter of respect, of a certain sort of understanding that comes between two trolls who have known each other for a very long time, and struggled against a mootual obstacle. In different ways, from different statures and for different reasons but the understanding is still there. And you both have a role that is not easy to cope with, or to have another troll respond to you with anything other than fear and a certain kind of lingering disgust. You slay trolls for the good of the Empire - and for the entertainment of the subjugglator corps. He hunts the guardian beasts of trolls of all colours, leaving wigglers and grubs orphaned in his wake - for the survival of all trollkind. Two different burdens, a different duty for each of you, but a similar result. It means you are both left alone. Except perhoofs, for these few moments that you can steal.

Once things are over and the bucket is shoved to a discreet corner of your respiteblock, you relax onto the comfortnubs and hear the rasping sound of his sparkbox. 

"Do you _mind_ ," you inquire, not moving yourself one iota as he sits up and starts to smoke another one of those terrible things. You feel too good to want to move. Scratches and bites sting in the aftermath, and your sense of pleasant, _satisfied_ lassitude is too much to want to ruin it.

"Me? I don't mind at all, Horuss." He blows out smoke, and you swat at his thigh lazily. The slap turns into a slow stroking movement, almost despite yourself; you've always enjoyed the feel of a well-muscled flank under your hand, after all. And among other things, Cronus Ampora has quite a nice turn of hindquarter. It's all the time he spends striding a deck and riding a skyhorse, you suppose. It really gives his legs nice definition. Solid cool muscle underneath the darkening grey of his hide. He chuckles, and then lifts his free hand to stroke his fingers through the length of your hair. From the front to the back of your skull in smooth motions, thumb skimming the base of your horns. "Go to sleep, old horse. Rest a bit."

You fall asleep with his fingers running through your hair and the scent of smoke, sweat and salt crowding your senses.

When you wake, he is gone. 

Your respiteblock smells like the densely rolled smokesticks he prefers, and there's still the bucket to get rid of. As well as your platform to clean. Well. You suppose you can't expect someone of his social rank and standing to do a few chores, but you would have appreciated it. Groaning a little, you shuffle your way to the ablutioncloset to wash yourself, and then start to go about the task of picking up the detritus of his whirlwind visit. There's a piece of paper on the nutritionalblock plateau, pinned down by the still empty discardcatcher. 

see you next swveep, zahhak.

Yes, you rather suppose you will. If there's one thing the Orphaner Dualscar does keep, it's his word.


End file.
